My Life as a Sys Admin

Category Archives: sipp

Ever since the entry of Docker, everyone is busy porting their applications to Docker Containers. Now with the tools like Mesos, CoreOS etc we can easily achieve scalability also. @Plivo we always dedicate ourselves to play around such new technologies. In my previous blog posts, i’ve explained how to containerize the Freeswitch, how to perform some basic load test using simple dialplans etc. My previous load tests required a bunch of basic Freeswitch servers to originate calls to flood the calls to the FreeSwitch container. So this time i’m going to use a simple method, which everyone can use even from their laptops.

Enter SIPp. SIPp is a free Open Source test tool / traffic generator for the SIP protocol. But the main issue for beginer like me is in generating a proper XML for SIPp that can match to my exact production scenarios. After googling, i came across a super simple ruby wrapper over SIPp called sippy_cup. SIPpy_cup is a simple ruby wrapper over SIPp. We just need to create a simple yaml file and sippy_cup parses this yml file and generates the XML equivalent which will be then used to generate calls. sippy_cup can also be used to generate only the XML file for SIPp.

Setting up sippy_cup is very simple. There are only two dependencies

1) ruby (2.1.2 recomended)
2) SIPp

Another important dependency is our local internet bandwidth. Flooding too many calls will definitely result in network bottlenecks, which i faced when i generated 1k calls from my laptop. Now let’s install SIPp.

Once we have installed SIPp and ruby, we can install sippy_cup via ruby gems.

gem install sippy_cup

Configuring sippy_cup

First we need to create yml file for our call flow. There is a good documentation available on the Readme on various options that can be used to create the yml to suit to our call flow. My call flow is pretty simple, i’ve a DialPlan in my Docker FS, which will play an mp3 file. So below is a simple yml config for this call flow

I tried to perform a large scale load test by making 1k calls with 250 concurrent calls. My local internet was flooding with network traffic as there was real Media packets coming from the servers, though it bottlenecked my internet, but still i was able to make 994 successfull calls. I suggest to do such heavy load test on machines wich has good network throughput. Below are the output for this test.